WordPress has become a popular choice for real estate website development. However, is it the best content management system (CMS) for your real estate website? We will examine why it may not be the best option for website owners.

Why Real Estate Website Designers Use WordPress

Since WordPress is a free and open source platform, it has become the popular choice for website providers and developers. Whether you’re building a community website or a shopping cart store, the availability of third-party themes and plugins allows you to accomplish just about anything you want.

WordPress offers website developers an excellent starting point and tools for creating a website. In the early years of our company, our website developers built websites from scratch with code using Notepad. WordPress now allows people to create websites even if they have no coding skills. In fact, many of those who know how to create websites using WordPress now call themselves “website developers” even though they have no knowledge of actual website coding.

Do It Yourself: The WordPress Learning Curve

If you have little to no knowledge of website development, the WordPress learning curve will be steep. Hosting and installing WordPress can be an intimidating and overwhelming task. Even with the availability of installation guides, installing WordPress itself can be a nightmare if you are unfamiliar with hosting lingo. When you install WordPress, you have a generic website that requires the installation of third-party themes and plugins. This is where we see that most users just throw in the towel and contact us. They have a project they wish they had never started, and the time they spent trying to launch their website could have been spent growing their business and getting more clients.

Have someone create your WordPress real estate website

Even if someone builds your website for you using WordPress, we still see many users coming to us for help. They still feel that the content of their website is difficult to manage and that changing its design is almost impossible. The main reason is that since WordPress was designed for all industries, there is so much in the backend that it becomes overwhelming. Most website owners only require a small percentage of the features available in WordPress.

Design

WordPress can create beautiful and attractive real estate websites with many real estate themes available to install. Themes give you a great starting point, but still require customization to achieve the website you really want. A WordPress theme is generic and requires a bit of customization to customize it for your business. In our experience, a WordPress theme will only get you about 50% of where you really want to be with your website. The other 50% requires removing the uploaded theme for just the things you want, adding your own relevant content and images, installing plugins, and customizing the layout.

WordPress vulnerability

With the popularity of WordPress comes many struggles for real estate website owners. One of those important and vital struggles is website security. Once a hacker finds a vulnerability in WordPress, all WordPress websites are open to attack. In November 2014, a vulnerability was discovered that left nearly 86 percent of the 75 million WordPress websites open to attack. Just a month earlier, 800,000 bank credentials were stolen from hacked WordPress websites.

If your website is built on WordPress, you most likely use third-party plugins. These third-party plugins can also contain vulnerabilities that make your website open to attack. If a vulnerability is found in the plugins, then you are at the mercy of the third-party developer to fix the security issue.

Now it is up to you whether you are going to use WordPress as a platform for your business or not. It is also your choice whether you will do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.